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Isaiah Berlin famously divided writers into two groups: hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs, he thought, were writers who had a single defining idea that their work expressed. Dostoevsky and Proust were hedgehogs. Foxes, though, have too many ideas milling around to be defined by a single one. Shakespeare and Joyce were foxes.

Berlin’s animals came to mind when trying to pin down exactly the type of writer Kazuo Ishiguro, the new Nobel laureate in literature, is. In these terms, Ishiguro is certainly a fox, but that doesn’t quite get him right. It doesn’t do justice to his extraordinary ability to reinvent himself from book to book. It’s not just that he has a different idea each time; it’s that...